The CFL announced a bunch of rule changes yesterday that will be phased in over the next few years and I’ve gotta tell ya, I don’t think I like ’em much.
Ok, so maybe that’s not totally fair. I’m sure some of it will be fine, and perhaps even good. If the play clock can get things moving along a little faster like the pitch clock has in baseball, for instance, it’s hard to see how that can be anything but a positive.
But this shortening the field business? You can pack that shit up and get it the fuck right out of here.
First of all, the whole premise it’s supposedly built on feels to me like a faulty one. Admittedly I don’t watch every game, but I’ve seen my share. And whenever I do watch, I never come away thinking that this right here is a league with a scoring problem. There’s an expression you often hear when people talk about Canadian football. “No lead is safe”. You hear it a lot because it tends to be true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stepped away from a game to deal with something or other only to come back to a score that’s completely flipped. that doesn’t happen because no one can find a frigging end zone. Is every game a barnburner? Of course not. But that would be the case regardless of what rules you change. But for me as a fan, the three downs as opposed to four and the longer field is exactly what makes even the less entertaining ones more exciting than they would be otherwise.
And that leads me to my biggest issue. I don’t watch the NFL, and I don’t want to. I watch the CFL because I think it’s better football. I understand that adapting is sometimes necessary, but setting us on a path toward complete NFLification isn’t adapting, it’s chasing an impossible dream. The CFL will never be the NFL, no matter how much some folks would like it to be (How ya doin’, MLSE?). People who prefer the NFL have plenty of options to get their fix from the actual NFL. I can’t imagine most of them having much need for a low budget, sad sack clone of it. Meanwhile, those of us who would like to support a CFL are eventually going to be left with nothing.
Yes, it would be nice to see the league grow and become more financially stable, especially in cities where losing money is a problem. But there have got to be better ways of accomplishing that than hollowing out and selling out the Canadian game until it’s no longer recognizable as the Canadian game.